At the age of 71, songwriter, poet, sculptor, and filmmaker (and widow of Lou Reed) presented in Madrid with a number of ‘performances’ in the Fundación Telefónica and the Museo Reina Sofia, plus a film cycle at the Filmoteca.
“do You unirías to a conga line”. The last thing anyone would expect to find in a piece from Laurie Anderson is a hint as sandunguera. And yet, at 71, and with the hair still on end, the widow of Lou Reed goes on Chalkroom and it enlarges a bit more on his image of the experimental artist.
“Dancing is the opposite of being alone, but that social experience in a site like this is ridiculous,” play to contradict the composer, poet, sculptor and filmmaker. In effect, Chalkroom, a virtual reality installation in which the spectator wanders between words and pictures as if you were in the dark world of Stranger Things, it is not precisely the malecon in Havana, but a “mental journey” lonely and scary, as you can verify who is close to the Espacio Fundación Telefónica from 17 November.
“I’m interested to see the anxiety with which people do things. Right now in the US there is a fixation with the fear, which is something common to all living creatures, unlike love, hate or ambition,” he adds. “In my country we never thought that we could lose democracy, but now we see that it is very unstable and is at risk.”
There are two other reasons to retain Anderson (Glen Ellyn, Illinois) in the capital of what remains of the weekend. One is the premiere in the National Museum Center of Art Queen Sofia of her performance, All the Things I lost in the flood, in which he recalls how hurricane Sandy flooded in 2012 in the basement of his home in New York, taking in front of its documentary archives and their memories. “What I learned then is that we should not accumulate a lot of things. I had a great feeling of relief when the water broke it all. Now the basement is more clear than ever.”
The last reason is the retrospective dedicated to him as the Filmoteca Española, the invited artist of this edition of the Festival Rhizome. Someone imperative to understand the creation of avant-garde of the TWENTIETH century through his essays on identity and memory. And, at the same time, a character able to take off the label intelectualoide when you feel like it, as when she put voice to one of the characters of the animated children’s Rugrats.
That his words should hear this Tuesday at Matadero Madrid, the same place for the one who passed Lou Reed’s the last time you came to Spain invited, finally, to speak of confluences, and energy. “It was a very fiery and direct. I just finished a book, The art of The straight line, with his essays and testimony from more than 70 people, about the energy which he drew from the practice of tai-chi”, advances in regard to a work that surely will be published during the coming year. “It’s funny, because, in China, Lou was most famous as a master of this martial art as a musician”.
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